1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to an image processing system and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for converting a two-dimensional image into a stereoscopic three-dimensional image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Image capturing and/or video recording devices proliferate throughout the general population and dominate a significant portion of the current global consumer electronics market. The widespread usage of such devices brings to light various defects. For example, these devices store images and/or video frames as merely two dimensional representations of a scene. Even if a depth map is provided, a three-dimensional representation cannot be rendered and viewed without utilizing significant processing power and memory capacity. In order to conserve resources, current technologies, therefore, limit these devices to capturing images depicting one of only a few possible views of the scene.
Furthermore, processing and storing the images causes artifacts. Artifacts, generally, include noticeable distortions of media (e.g., an image, audio and/or video) due to the application of an overly aggressive or inappropriate lossy data compression algorithm. For example, certain block-based inpainting or three-dimension projection techniques cause these noticeable distortions. When such an image is received, a block-by-block decoding of the image is performed to reconstruct the transferred image. The quantization of the individual image blocks is necessarily associated with a loss of information that can result in visible edges at the block boundaries during the reconstruction. These artifacts can be especially prominent when a very rough quantization is provided corresponding to large quantization parameters.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for converting a two-dimensional image into a stereoscopic three-dimensional image that produces fewer artifacts.